Last Jungle In Sector 17 - When Indie Dream turns into Indie Reality- aka
our Kickstarter disaster.Right after the launch we sent out emails to 65 gaming news sites and
posted announcements to 68 forums and to our twitter, facebook, steam,
youtube and indiedb channels. The response was rather cold, we got 1 reply
from the press (greenlitgaming.com) and many forums actually banned us for
advertising. After 26 hours, we had managed to get 284 video views and 7
backers (5 of them within first hours after launch).

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Suppa7 wrote on Aug 26, 2013, 14:22:So many indie developers suffer from dunning krueger, thinking they are better and that there games are better then they really are.

Reality is most indies suck and their games are mostly mediocre to bad, if not entire rip offs of games from a long time ago.

And several dozen side scrollers (indie or commercial game makers) are not very interesting.

And that's really the crux of the matter. Though it's wider than that. There are too many people trying to pitch too many video games at all levels of production. Everything from 2 guys with an idea to 100 man studios that want to make MOBA n+1. With so many (too many) video games in production, a lot of them are going to fail to grab attention and players. If nothing else because of Sturgeon's Law (90% of everything is crap).

They at least seem to understand the outcome - you don't get much traction unless you get listed on a major news site - so there's that. But I'm not sure they understand the cause, which is unfortunate. With the flood of video games people simply don't have time to evaluate every single game, let alone every single Indie game. IGN, TotalBiscuit, etc are essentially the pre-readers for the larger gaming community, which is harsh but necessary to distill so much information into something an individual can handle. If you can't make a major news site then it's probably not just a matter of them not knowing about you; it's you failing to make the cut. Which again sucks, but it has to happen to someone.

Creston wrote on Aug 26, 2013, 12:44:

and posted announcements to 68 forums

Major faux-pas. Nobody wants to see their forums turn into fucking craigslist.

That may be the most damning bit of all of this. Spamming forums not only shows the authors to be ethically questionable, but they fail to understand the difference between self-promotion and having a 3rd party discuss your game on a forum, and why that differentiation matters.